From phm@a2e.de  Thu May 31 09:47:35 2001
From: phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 10:47:35 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: [Patents] Re: Konno 1995: The Karmarkar patent and Software -- does math
 patenting work?
In-Reply-To: <020c01c0e976$557ad560$6401a8c0@flint1.mi.home.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.31.0105311001390.11153-100000@querty.oas.a2e.de>

Ronald Riley replied:

>> There's another Japanese book called:
>> Soshou Boukoku Amerika
>> USA: How to Ruin a Country by Litigation
>>
>> It describes a vicious cycle of lawyers using rule-setting power to
>> further empower lawyers and to enlarge the market for litigation
>> business.

> Interesting.  I have dealt with three different Japanese companies who are
> infringing my patents.  All three were incredibly dishonest.  In fact worse than
> American multinationals.
>
> So why are the Japanese bad mouthing American attorneys?

They aren't really doing that, as far as I can see.
The book rather seems to be talking about a loss of checks and balances in
a certain part of the american political economy.

> Well the reason is simple, they are getting their backsides kicked in
> American courts because they are ripping off American inventors.

The problems of individual American patent-owners enforcing their claims
against Japanese companies may be of great importance from your point of
view.  But not from the point of view of that book or of Japanese
businesses.

>From the big business point of view, patent extortion by small entities is
a nuisance, especially when these small entities are not selling products
but only marketing patents.

> Now lets look at why.  Japan is good a production and small
> incremental improvements of product.  This is a direct result of a
> culture which views people as cogs in their machine.  The culture
> viciously stamps out independent thought.  That in turn leaves the
> Japanese ill equipped to make breakthrough inventions.

Even if this was completely so, it would mean that they are very well
equipped to make use of the patent system.  Most patents are granted for
small incremental improvements.  However I have come across several
Japanese patents on breakthrough inventions.

The cultural difference that the above book is interested in is that of
litigation.  Japanese society views small entities who specialise in
litigation as villains.  Japanese companies avoid going to court.  You can
of course say that this again is a result of some bad (mafiose?) culture
pattern.  But however you explain the fact and whatever bad problems Japan
may be suffering from, it is not suffering from the uncontrollable
explosion of litigation and lawyer power that this book is talking about.

> The bottom line is that the Japanese patent system is designed to
> socialize creativity for the benefit of big business.

Any patent system is designed to speed up the socialisation of ideas, i.e.
their disclosure to the public and their diffusion into the social process
of generating more ideas.

Ideas are only private as long as they remain secret.

It is somewhat contradictory of you to
(1) portray big business as the foe of the individual "inventor"
(2) advocate a business model where small inventors seek rents from
    big business

> Now my beef is not with the majority of the Japanese people, who in my
> view are being victimized by those same disreputable big businesses.
> And if the Japanese people chose to accept such, well that is their
> choice.  There is considerable evidence that the Japanese people are
> rebelling against such.

> They may accept that peoples creations should all go to the benefit of
> big business, but I and other American inventors are not about to
> accept those Japanese companies coming here and taking the fruits of
> our creativity.

> It does sound to me like PILCH Hartmut may want to consider going to
> Japan.  His views are most certainly in line with the big Japanese
> business agenda.  Namely to socialize people's creations for their own
> profit.

Indeed I do not like the business model of the rent-seeking "small
inventor".  It is unfair, because it unduly privileges certain types of
creative activity (e.g. I don't get a rent for having found a great new
narrative technique) and because it does that in a very disruptive way.

That is a perversion of the patent system which has been tolerated only
because it serves so well as a popular gold-digger myth, badly needed for
PR purposes by a system whose reality is inevitably biased toward big
business.

There are good economic reasons to advocate a patent system as what it
really is:  a system of granting time-limited monopolies in order to
better regulate competition between large business entities.  This is how
Werner Siemens argued for the patent system, and the result was that in
its time of best function in Germany during the first decades after 1873,
inventors weren't even mentioned on the patent descriptions and the patent
fees were exorbitantly high.

The "small inventor" is not a good reason for granting patents.  Nor is
"intellectual property".  Those are myths, and every use of them leads
away from the potential beneficial function of the patent system and is in
fact a declaration of moral bankruptcy.

--
Hartmut Pilch
Federation for a Free Information Infrastructure        http://www.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation	      http://swpat.ffii.org/
For a software patent free Europe PLEASE SIGN http://petition.eurolinux.org/



